Big Data, Smart Meters and the (Near) Real-Time Grid: The term meter data management (MDM) covers a lot of gro...

The term meter data management (MDM) covers a lot of ground in the smart grid space. We’re talking everything from simple databases to record and bill customers based on digital meter reads, to complex platforms that link outage detection, power quality measurement, verification and estimation analytics and all other sorts of utility functions into smoothly working systems. At least, that’s the theory. But to get all that different software working together, MDM platforms have to tackle the key challenge of data flow. Most of the world’s advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) networks feed back data in 15-minute or hourly increments, but they’re also capable of faster communication for emergency functions. At the same time, no network is perfect, and every AMI deployment has to deal with dropped or delayed data, whether due to software glitches or fallen tree limbs and oth...